Wednesday 25 February 2009

More on nuts

This might explain why nut allergies don't seem to exist in Africa - kids eat lots of them at an early age and build up a tolerance.

4 comments:

Old Holborn said...

"In 2007, five people died from anaphylactic shock caused by an adverse reaction to food, the latest official figures for England and Wales show"

Remarkable. From 60,000,000 of us.

No wonder there is a MASSIVE industry and Gummint awareness programme.

Why aren't nuts banned? After all, "if it saves just one life, blah, blah, blah".

Dave H said...

Not having any specialist knowledge, much of this is counter-intuitive to me. With many substances it is exposure, even at trace levels, that causes the sensitisation to develop in the first place. People develop an allergy to bee stings by being stung.

I've known research chemists that have had their careers harmed by suddenly becoming sensitised to the very class of chemicals in which they specialised.

There is a tragic irony to being a world expert on a compound with which you can't even share a building without your skin breaking out in sores. Although I suppose it's much the same with divorces.

Hughes Views said...

Alas I fear at least part of the explanation may be that infant and child mortality rates are much higher in many parts of Africa than in the UK. Thus many allergy sufferers will have died young, almost unremarked by society or “the authorities” and without their allergy having been noticed or diagnosed. Their cause of death, whether due to the allergy or not, is unlikely to have been reliably assessed.

Unknown said...

"nut allergies don't seem to exist in Africa"

Is this an international version of an urban myth? Perhaps they are too worried about malaria, AIDS and malnutrician to count the people with peanut allergies